State Cult and Popular Religiosity
According to Confucianism, the worship of great deities was the affair of the state, ancestral worship is required of all, and a multitude of popular cults are tolerable. Confucianism tolerated magic and mysticism as long as they were useful tools for controlling the masses; it denounced them as heresy and suppressed them when they threatened the established order (hence the opposition to Buddhism). Another notable quality was the avoidance or both irrational ecstasy and excitement, as well as mystic contemplation and metaphysical speculation.
Note that in this context Confucianism can be referred to as the state cult, and Taoism as the popular religion.
Read more about this topic: The Religion Of China: Confucianism And Taoism
Famous quotes containing the words state, cult, popular and/or religiosity:
“Mother,
each time I talk to God
you interfere.
You of the bla-bla set,
carrying on about the state of letters.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“By Modernism I mean the positive rejection of the past and the blind belief in the process of change, in novelty for its own sake, in the idea that progress through time equates with cultural progress; in the cult of individuality, originality and self-expression.”
—Dan Cruickshank (b. 1949)
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)
“Nothing is more indispensable to true religiosity than a mediator that links us with divinity.”
—Novalis [Friedrich Von Hardenberg] (1772–1801)